Daring women from the past

During the Southern Festival of Books, Karen Abbot was able to sit down and chat with us about her latest book, Liar, Temptress, Solider, Spy, which details the lives of four women who bucked societal convention, risked their lives and became spies during the Civil War.

Getting her daily dose of literature

In October 2008, Nina Sankovitch launched a year-long project: She would read one book a day, every day, for a year. The idea was to give some structure to her life after the tragic death of her older sister. In addition to reading the books, Sankovitch also committed herself to reviewing each of them on a website she created, ReadAllDay. As...

A crash landing in Shangri-La

Shangri-La became a synonym for a remote, secluded paradise in 1933 via the James Hilton novel Lost Horizon. That name gained much wider currency in 1937 after the book was made into a movie. Little wonder, then, that in the spring of 1944, when a U.S. Army Air Force pilot on a reconnaissance flight “discovered” a wide, fertile...